Haven t We Had Enough Help Already?

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Haven't We Had Enough Help Already?

Because SAP R/3 is designed to work in many different kinds and sizes of organizations, its help is necessarily generic. There will be procedures that you never need to follow where you work, and fields you never need to fill in (or always fill with the same value).

It therefore falls to your project team to provide detailed, step-by-step help (Task Sheets) on how to perform each business process in SAP R/3 where you work. These instructions also help define a consistent way of doing business. An example of a Task Sheet might be Create Purchase Requisition.

There are many different approaches and delivery methods for getting this help to the people who need it, but some of the common elements are as follows :

• When to follow the procedure and what needs to have occurred beforehand.

• What values are needed to complete the transaction.

• The name of each field that must be filled in and how they are used. Some approaches don't even mention fields that aren't required.

• The method for moving through the screens required for the transactions.

• The screen titles the user will see throughout the process.

• The expected end result of the procedure.

SAP itself markets two tools to help with the training process : the Personal Navigator and InfoDB.

Personal Navigator

Personal Navigator is a slick tool that you can use to demonstrate a process, practice on your training system, or actually use to coach an employee through completing a transaction on your live system. Arrows appear onscreen, pointing to the next element you need to fill in (or click). Little boxes appear, telling you what to put in each field.

It is worth remembering, however, that

• Somebody on your project team will still have to go through all the steps to describe how to use SAP R/3 in your shop.

• Your users need to learn how to use Personal Navigator itself before it can help them to do anything.

• Some users still prefer to have their help on paper in addition to onscreen.

• Personal Navigator comes at a significant cost; you need to work to ensure that you get full value out of it .

InfoDB

InfoDB evolved to gather all of SAP's training materials together and provide tools for the following:

• Reuse of existing training objects (slides, exercises, and so on)

• Presentation and distribution of training materials

SAP used this product internally, and then started marketing it to clients to assist with the development of training materials.

Courses have been repackaged to more closely match job functions (such as warehouse clerk) rather than grouped into SAP modules (such as MM). Early user interfaces are improved, and SAP now sees this product as the answer for warehousing all its clients'non-relational (not in table format) information .

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